Turning Points into a Path

While work continues on controlling our newly arrived motors, we’re also developing the software and mathematics that will allow us to transform the user’s commands into direct controls for our Nodes (the modules that will be spooling in or reeling out the wire which holds our camera). We recently validated our initial implementation of a control scheme, which will allow a user to set waypoints for the camera to fly through in a smooth path. We’ve done this by first transforming the waypoints into something called a spline, a parametrized function consisting of multiple 2nd to 4th order curves. We then generate arrays of locations which our camera should be at, and use a simple function to generate the lengths of our node wires for each point.

Below you can see the lovely graphs that we generated to validate our model.